Monday, August 9, 2010

Book Report: Mind over Money

My most recent financial book was Mind over Money: Match Your Personality to a Winning Financial Strategy by John W. Schott. It's not exactly recent - published in 2000. Schott's advice lies somewhere between day traders and buy and holders - tailored to specific personality types. It was published before the recent wave of behavioral economics books (to wit: Mind over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health, which I have not read but was published in late 2009.

I didn't really feel like I matched any of Schott's personality profiles but there were a couple of things I like. First a quote:

Wealth accrues from a pattern of generally right behavior, not from trying to extract the maximum profit out of each and every situation, since one never knows what the maximum might be.

Which I liken to my baseball analogy: it's better to hit singles and doubles, get men on base and move the runners rather than hit a home run at every at bat. The next part I liked was Appendix B: Net Present Value: A Calculation for Confident Buying. For awhile I've been looking for methods to calculate values of companies that is short of getting an MBA. This is a great 3 page start.